Lady in the Water (2006)

The lest said about the plot of the film the better. Not because it's bad because it's an imaginative one, and you should really go in having no idea what you're in store for. That's part of the point of the movie.

The introduction of this movie is done in cave drawings. It's a fitting opening and a good clue that this movie is about stories. No, not modern film, which many critics and audiences today think is about pushing boundaries and constantly doing something 'new'. This movie is about the good old fashioned story. The reason why our ancient ancestors sat around fires and told them, and their ability to inspire and save souls.

There isn't anything truly new about it (it has roots in the classic fairy tales and epic poems of antiquity), other than the fact that it dares to be a great film made in the mondern era in spite of being littered with elements of the now despised classical story (which apparently isn't good enough for modern film makers anymore).

The thing about these classic stories and the one that Shaymalan is attempting to tell is that they have a purpose, and strive to inspire society and humanity as a whole. They lead people to do great things, and make us all feel better in the end, where most modern 'stories' feel more like egotistical attempts of "artists" to make themselves feel great and leave us in awe of their great greatness.

Christopher Doyle lends some excellent shots to this film, which some how manage to make a scene of an every day loser frigthenedly warding off a were-wolf type monster with a pool skimmer seem exceptionally epic. At the same time it helps the story (for me at least) pull those same strings that great stories like Gilgamesh, and the Aeneid pull.

I saw this film the day it opened and I was delighted. I came home, as is my habit, and read all the reviews. A good section of this movie is directed at attacking assanine, jaded, film critics who think their opinions are authoratitive (it depicts them as being the ruiners of the classic story), and so, all of the assanine, jaded, and authoratative film critics seem to have panned it.

No one seemed really sure what the movie was about, but were all quick to pan M. Night as being arrogant for casting himself in the role of a writer destined to change the world. They, ironically, claim that he was being arrogant, completing unable to fathom that their own presumptions about why he cast himself in that role could in fact be a good deal more arrogant...

I'll have to admit that I've been the jaded film critic before, but one I came out of this one I remembered why I've always loved stories, and why they don't' always have to be new and fit into some silly sense of "reality".